1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a communication protocol high-speed processing system in an information communication network, communication control equipment for executing the system, and protocol high-speed conversion equipment adopting the system.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In the prior art, processes of communication protocol in an information communication network are started by determining the kind of a received frame at an instant when the receiving process of the information frame (or packet) is ended. One system for shortening the time period from the receiving of the frame to the sending of the acknowledgment is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 62-164345, a system which utilizes the fact that the information frame is divided into data and a control field preceding the data, 1.) to judge receiving ends of a control field and data through hardware control, 2.) to start the preparations of decoding and sending of the control field at the end of the receive processing of the control field, 3.) to start the processing of the data at the end of the receive processing of all the data, and 4.) to disperse the time bands of the processing by a micro program thereby to shorten the time period from the frame receive processing to the acknowledgment sending.
The above-specified system notes that the preparations for sending the acknowledgment frame can be started at the end of the receive processing of the control field while not awaiting the end of the receive processing of the whole frame. The system still follows conventional, ordinal systems of the prior art in that the frame is decoded after it is received and still has a room for increased speed. In the layered communication protocol, moreover, there is room for improvements in the speed of layered protocol processing, whether the processing is to be accomplished by the hardware or software, and how the control field (i.e., a header) in the frame is to be processed.